and love's the burning boy
by sweetspontaneous
Summary: post-hogwarts, post-war, post-voldemort. (i've seen your flag on the marble arch love is not a victory march it's a cold and it's a broken hallelujah). slash: ginnyhermione, harrydraco. chapter six (!).
1. fixing her hair

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and love's the burning boy.

slash: (ginny/hermione), (harry/draco). also (draco/ginny). 

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disclaimer: characters not mine- just borrowing them from JKR. Lyrics in the summary are credit to Leonard Cohen, originally (I think), although I was actually listening to the Rufus Wainwright cover, and I've taken the lines out of context and thus warped the meaning, I imagine. Oh well.

-**this** started off as a one-shot ginny/hermione, but it's a bit like a weed- keeps on growing and twisting, won't stay out of my head. Should be something like eight or ten chapters when complete, if i ever get there. Pretty dark right now, but i think there's a happy ending in there somewhere, and i'll try to keep the dramatics to a minimum (no, that's a lie; i like drama. there will be drama.)

-(And if you've never listened to anything by Ani DiFranco, go download the song I plagiarized the first chapter title from right now and listen to it. The story can wait. And while I'm on the subject, you should also go read the complete works of Elizabeth Bishop. Right now. I mean it.)

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-summary(sort of)- Set post-hogwarts, post-war, and post-voldemort. Remember when your mother told you that life isn't fair?

-hermione loves ginny and loved ron, and hates draco because he loves ginny, who loved harry and misses ron, and thinks she loves draco, who loves ginny but not the way he loves harry, who tries not to hate ginny just because she loves draco, and loves draco. At least, that's where things stand right now(subtle, eh?)

Anyway, here it is; enjoy, and review if you like. (please?)

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Casabianca (Elizabeth Bishop)

Love's the boy stood on the burning deck

trying to recite "The boy stood on

the burning deck." Love's the son

stood stammering elocution

while the poor ship in flames went down.

Love's the obstinate boy, the ship,

even the swimming sailors, who

would like a schoolroom platform, too,

or an excuse to stay 

on deck.

****

And love's the burning boy .

chapter one: _fixing her hair_

Hermione's feeling dramatic, but that's okay, because it's a dramatic sort of night. Wind outside the apartment is howling through the charcoal and watercolour trees, and rain sheets down like shards of broken glass, or dirty paintbrush water. More like the glass, more like shattered stainglass windows. Hermione has not been to church in a long long time. The light inside the apartment, here, casting burnt umber shadows across the floor- here, the light is dull, shadowy gold, because the power's gone out and all they have are candles. At least the heat is still on. 

Hermione folds a towel and presses it against the chink at the bottom of the window, although it's useless really and she knows the floor will be soaked by morning anyway. Cold wind has, lately, a way of soaking through, even on her canvas. She looks out at the night. Leaves are tearing from the trees, streaking down on the gale and skittering madly over the rain-glazed asphalt. Even the streetlights are out.

The bathroom door opens with a blast of titanium white and dove grey steam (brushed on in diluted acrylic and rubbed soft with a rag.) Ginny comes out drying her hair, red ochre shot through with gold. Hermione paints it this way: First, a solid layer of iridescent gold acrylic, left to dry while she mixes a brilliant flame from cadmium red and light amber. Now, layer on red over gold. Acrylics dry fast. Next, be brave, be decisive, and reveal the gold in strokes with a blunted knife. Hermione could mix the colours in her sleep. 

Ginny sits down at the mirror and summons a couple of glows, her face eerie in the twilight. Hermione leaves the window and the night unfinished in dark not-yet-dry oils, and crosses the room because she's got that feeling again of a thousand silver fishhooks sharp under her skin, the lines pulling taut. She curls into the armchair behind Ginny and watches her in silence. 

Ginny's hands are twisting through her long red hair; her eyes are intent on the mirror. The bruise on her shoulder is cobalt blue and mars black. Hermione unconsciously reaches up to pull her not-quite-shoulderlength curls into a spiky ponytail. She listens to Ginny singing ever-so-softly under her breath and can't believe, no matter how many times she has painted it, the dancing gold in her hair. The cuffs of her shirt are stained in every colour of the rainbow, except for silver. Hermione has always associated people with colours. Ron is clear deep atlantic blue, or bright warm gold; Harry is greens, like fresh grass and emeralds, and browns, like chocolate and terracotta clay. Draco Malfoy is silver, and only silver, because Hermione can't paint without grey, so she won't give him grey. Silver is, at least, avoidable. 

Ginny once asked her to paint the two of them together, after a month of relative peace. Hermione just explained that she had no silver, that silver was hard to come by, even in the Diagon Alley art stores. She would have to have just the right silver for Draco Malfoy's beautiful (dead blank cold cruel) silver eyes, she said. And that kind of silver is hard to find. Ginny looked at her roommate unhappily with her own beautiful (oh, beautiful, and wondering, and how sad, how sad) beautiful green-gold eyes. Three days later, Draco left Ginny alone again for a while, and the subject hasn't come up since. 

"So he called to apologize?" Hermione paints Ginny's eyes in oils, even when the rest of the canvas is acrylics or charcoal or pastel. Nothing else is really dark enough.

"Yes." Ginny is still looking in the mirror, but she finds Hermione there now and watches her guardedly. Too many times, Hermione has taken the knife she uses to find the gold in Ginny's hair and scratched too deep, through to the canvas, through to the bone. Hermione shrinks a little at the pain she thinks she might have painted into those eyes, already dark enough. It is not easy to be Ginny, who understands too well the price of love. It is also not easy to love her. Hermione feels fairly sure (feels certain, certain as blue and yellow mix to green) that she is the only one who knows, who has ever known, this second thing. 

But still, it is not easy to be Ginny, especially, Hermione thinks violently, when you've dashed off black from your canvas with a chemical soaked rag (and how Hermione hates Tom Riddle), and rubbed away the faint coloured pencil lines that were beneath of green-like-grass and chocolate-brown (although she can't hate Harry, ever), and replaced those with silver which is all too easily mistaken for white, for nothing. Especially, (and here she finds someone to hate more than all the rest), when the one who has a colour for everyone but herself, paint streaked hands and a tongue like her knife, is painting ugly shapes on your silver canvas with an acid truthful brush. Ginny knows the price of love because love has always hurt her, and now, one way or another, it continues to do so.

Thinking this, Hermione closes her mouth and swallows her response, although it tastes like the water and chemical she washes her brushes in, although she knows it will poison her, because she knows that her beloved oil paints are made with lead, with slow poison. 

"I'm glad," she says softly. Ginny bends her head and her hair falls around her face, a curtain of liquid fire. "No, Ginny, I mean it. I hopeI hope he means it, this time."

Ginny looks up at her with something almost like hope, almost like happiness. After she leaves, tonight, Hermione will paint her like this, in oils and acrylics on white canvas. She'll lick the paint from her brushes, after, swallow the bitter everyday poison. Now, she gets up and crosses the distance, and hugs Ginny for one second, imagining that she can paint the world in new colours for Ginny, or give her, at least, a new white canvas. Pulling away, she stands behind Ginny, watching her in the mirror, and begins to arrange heavy swirls of red and gold acrylic on her white shoulders, where they will hide the bruises. 

"Here, let me fix your hair."


	2. weapon

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and love's the burning boy

-disclaimer to be found in first chapter

(What kind of scale compares the weight of two beauties/ the gravity of duty/or the groundspeed of joy/ Tell me, what kind of gage can quantify elation/ what kind of equation could I possibly employ)- Ani DiFranco, _School Night._

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chapter two: _weapon_

Draco is sitting at the kitchen table in Harry's apartment, again. The sunlight raining in the open window makes everything in the room glow and melt gold into its own shadow. Harry has one of those crystal suncatchers hanging in the window that splits the light into shards of rainbow that stain the walls and the table and the floor. Harry isn't here; Draco heard him leave early this morning, while he himself was still curled up shivering on the couch under three layers of blankets. Both of them are used to this by now- showing up at one another's doors sometime past midnight, looking for someone to convince them that morning will still come, even after everything. Harry is always matter-of-fact about it; he leans in the door half-asleep, green eyes hazy and unfocused, and calmly offers Draco a cup of coffee. Then, Draco swears at Harry and pushes past him to the liquor cabinet. He doesn't start shaking until later, after Harry's gone back to bed. Then, he sits in the dark kitchen and stares at his hands and remembers a play he once read, and the only reason he doesn't get up to wash his hands again is that Harry might hear him, and worry, more than he already does. Harry has read Shakespeare too, and he knows about guilt. 

On the table there are three things- a typewriter, a bottle, a knife. The sun is caught swimming in the translucent amber of the half-empty bottle of scotch. Draco's typewriter doesn't quite accord with the poetic simplicity of the scene, which is why he likes it where it is. The page in it just now is blank. Draco got up this morning with a pounding headache and the intention of writing a letter, then clearing out of Harry's apartment and taking the underground back to his own place, where he could get some work done on the short story he is supposed to be writing for the _New Yorker. _He has been staring at the blank white paper for nearly an hour, and he can't remember who he was going to address the letter to, or what he was planning to say. 

Draco picks up the knife, carefully, because he knows exactly how sharp it is. Spellbound silver, charmed not to dull, not ever. He finds his own reflection faraway and distorted in the narrow blade, which is etched with ancient magic and stained (scarred) with more than one blood. An assassin's knife, so it has no name engraved in the hilt- one of the first things Draco ever owned that did not have the family crest somewhere ostentatiously displayed. The first thing Draco did with this knife was a piece of fairly simple impromptu self-surgery; not the sort of thing one finds in medical textbooks. It was risky, uncertain work, judging just how deep he had to cut to go beneath that enchanted ink, knowing how narrow the margin of error was. Draco thinks, now, that he would not have had the nerve to do it, if he had cared too much about the risk, the result.

It's worse when Harry comes to Draco's apartment. Draco learned enough from those three years of war and betrayal (which is never what they call it, now) that he could have kept his eyes blank and his mouth shut while they tore out his throat (while they murdered his mother.) But while Draco was a spy and an assassin, Harry was a hero, a crusader, and he wears his heart like armour. So it's worse when Harry shows up at Draco's door, because Harry has never been very good at pretending. Draco can see the terror, the incomprehension that he won't admit to in himself, in Harry's green eyes. So it's worse when Harry comes to Draco's apartment, memories raw and burning, visibly falling apart, far too trusting. It terrifies Draco that anyone would willingly reveal that much of themselves to him, when his hands are so practiced at sharpening knives.

The knife is an assassin's knife, enchanted to keep a record on its blade of everyone it's ever cut, invisible to everyone but Draco himself. Draco has done a lot of things he'd like to forget, but he keeps the knife because he can't forget _it_; the image is too compelling, too good to throw away, and he can't erase the silver etchings. At the end of the story they called him a hero. But weapons stay sharp a very long time; swords do not easily turn to ploughshares. Draco leaves the knife with Harry most of the time, now, because Harry knows how to handle weapons. 

Which is, of course, exactly what Draco is. He likes the neatness of that, the many levels, the play on words. His own personal extended metaphor. He adds detail, another concrete image, grinning wryly at the implied comparison, the clever twist in characterization. A little dramatic, he thinks critically, but interesting anyway. A weapon: dangerous, always, and uncertain enough about his loyalties that for a long time he was a knife with no hilt, half-made, sharp at every edge. There are always those so desperate for a weapon that they will risk anything. Draco is used to being used- for a long time it didn't matter to him which side he was wielded by. So he spent a few razor years in the service of one Tom Marvolo Riddle, learning the lessons of loyalty, power, and fear. Then, afterwards, Albus Dumbledore was not so very different. There are only two people who have never used Draco. Both of them have green eyes. One of them he loves, and one, he knows, loves him.

Draco reaches for the bottle of sunshot amber liquid and downs another bitter mouthful. His hand looks gold through the glass. He closes his eyes and turns his face blindly to the sun, imagining, for one second, gentle, strong hands cupping his face, and green eyes.

Sometimes Draco thinks he's colourblind, or fixated, because he knows _her_ eyes, pain-dark, brilliant, flecked with gold, are not the right green eyes. Still, he can love her sometimes- although he's never been able to explain how it happened, two people with so many sharp edges and so many scars. It doesn't make sense that sometimes around her he feels something almost like hope, almost like happiness, when other times they can barely speak to each other without opening up old wounds. It doesn't make sense that every time he leaves(because she never leaves, Draco thinks- Ginny is stubborn, she'd rather fight it out, fists and shouting and breaking glass. Draco can't decide whether this is brave or only stupid; sometimes he thinks it's both.) But it doesn't make sense that every time he lets her go they're backing away from each other across the room, still holding hands as long as they can across the space between. She's got the wrong green eyes, but she loved him first, and she believed in him enough for both of them. She loved him first, and green is green. Ginny Weasley makes Draco wish he'd never been a weapon, because then he could have loved her, he thinks, without destroying her, without being destroyed. 

He is still staring at an empty page, blinding white in the morning sun. He's tired of all this symbolism, and of knowing the scene he's written into. Once upon a time would do just fine, for a change. At least then he'd know how to finish it. He's still staring at an empty page, because although he knows he's good with words, there's nothing he can think of left to say.

What he writes, in the end, is "I love you. I'm sorry." And even then, he doesn't know who it is he's writing to.

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that's it. chapter three coming soon to a theatre near you. reviews are good.


	3. queen of spades

-yes, there's just a little drama here. just a little. forgive me.

-I was just rereading CoS, and I discovered that Ginny has brown eyes, not green. So sue me. (except the truth is, it really _does_ bother me when I make mistakes like that. But I needed her to have green eyes) Oh, and I spelled the word "gauge" wrong in the quotation at the beginning of the last chapter, which makes me want to strangle myself with the mouse cord, actually. So I'm very very sorry, and I'll be more careful in the future.

Anyway, without further ado, here's (drumroll please) chapter three. 

Chapter 3: _queen of spades_

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The tumult in the heart

keeps asking questions.

And then it stops and undertakes to answer

in the same tone of voice.

No one could tell the difference.

Uninnocent, these conversations start, 

and then engage the senses,

only half-meaning to.

And then there is no choice,

and then there is no sense; 

until a name

and all its connotation are the same

(Elizabeth Bishop, _Conversation_)

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Ginny is sitting in the corner seat of the dome car, on the Hogwarts Express. There's not much light; the air is so thick, so slow that she might as well be breathing clouds, or water. This is strange, because, as she remembers it, the top of the car is curved patterned coloured glass. The long ride to Hogwarts was a rainbow dream, the first time, and even after that she always liked to look at the glass. It reminded her sharply of the time before, when she'd been able to dream awake because she didn't dream so much, asleep. The line between dream and reality was blurred beyond any hope of recognition, that year. Even now, the difference between memory and nightmare is equally complex.

Ginny has had enough experience with dreams to learn to dread sleep. She is disappointed, then, when she looks up and the ceiling is not a ceiling at all, wide and black and scattered with stars. She would have liked to see the jewel-bird tatters of that splintered rainbow again, although coloured light doesn't show up on painted canvas quite as clearly as on white. 

The table has a chessboard stenciled in the centre. Around the edges there used to be tally marks carved in the wood- seven years of chess games finished with the same triumphant grin, same flash of sky-blue eyes. Hermione always paints Ron in blue and gold. Ginny remembers these things, still, chess and cards and a shared mess of candy and chocolate frogs, that tilting, dizzy feeling of knowing three people in this world whom she could die for, who would die for her. It was almost too much, intoxicating, and all the more since she knew, better than the rest of them did, then, how dangerous that kind of love could be. She looks up, around the table. The brown-eyed queen of spades is dealing cards with long, graceful hands like two white birds. She shakes her short dark hair back and flashes a quick, glowing smile at Ginny that Ginny can't quite place. She knows the face, but she hasn't seen that smile in years, and it was never meant for her, before.

"The game, ladies and gentlemen, is hearts," says the queen of spades, and Ginny knows the voice, light and laughing. "Play will begin to the left of the dealer. Aces are wild."

"Do you know how to play?" asks the king of clubs, turning to Ginny with clear green eyes, as serious as ever. Ginny shakes her head, and discovers that she is wearing a crown set with multifaceted rubies, sparkling tiny hearts. 

"That's alright. I'll teach you," says the queen of spades, touching Ginny's wrist lightly. Her hand lingers, and Ginny notices paint under her nails and streaking the back of her hand. The air smells, incongruously, of honeysuckle and dry grass. If memory were not so fickle, Ginny thinks frantically- because she _remembers_ this, has a feeling she should understand. This is like finding the missing piece of a puzzle, long after the image is gone. A summer daybut it's on the other side of tinted glass now, like everything else. 

The king of clubs leans over to say something to the king of diamonds, who is holding a white kitten. Ginny would wonder about this, but everything seems to be refusing to make sense in this distant place. Then the king of diamonds looks up at her with an oddly joyous sort of smile. 

"This is a might-have-been, Queen of Hearts- in this deck of cards you'll find no ace of spades. No _riddles_." He pauses, and she recognizes with a start grey eyes like melted silver. Then he continues, more serious. "Try to know, lady, when enough is not enough. Play the hand you're dealt- but I think you'll find the game can still be won." He holds her gaze momentarily before looking away and up, out at the stars on the ceiling. 

Ginny looks back to the queen of spades, confused. The brown-eyed girl is sitting in tall grass on the far bank of the river, and sun is glinting in her dark-gold hair. She smiles reassuringly and raises one arm high in the air.

"Choose a card, my queen." She lets go, and the deck of cards takes off into the air with a swift beating of wings. One bird breaks away from the flight to land in Ginny's palm, but the card, when she turns it over, is blank. The girl across the river laughs. Ginny wants to ask her to call back the birds and give a clearer answer, but the queen of spades is already dancing away barefoot over grass into the blue distance, and still Ginny can't remember who she is (if she ever knew). 

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yes, it's short. another chapter soon, i promise. meantime review? 


	4. not yet lost

-so this is chapter four. i hope it makes some sense. tell me what you think?

Chapter 4: _not yet lost_

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(All in green went my love riding

on a great horse of gold

into the silver dawn.

Four fleet does at a gold valley

the famished arrow sang before.

Bow at belt went my love riding

riding the mountain down

into the silver dawn.

four lean hounds crouched low and smiling

the sheer peaks ran before.

Paler be they than daunting death

the sleek slim deer

the tall tense deer. 

Four tall stags at a green mountain

the lucky hunter sang before.

All in green went my love riding

on a great horse of gold

into the silver dawn.

four lean hounds crouched low and smiling

my heart fell dead before.

-e.e. cummings )

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(still dreaming)

Ginny stands in the sunlight for a while, feeling as though she should be crying, although she can't remember the reason. She feels obscurely guilty, and the watercolour sky is dripping sunset colours into the river, like a painting Hermione did once. 

"Queen of Hearts."

She turns quickly, trying not to hope. This has happened so many times; on a subway platform or across a crowded room, she'll catch a tall figure with red hair, just beyond her peripheral vision, or she'll hear a voice she used to know. Sometimes now she doesn't let herself look, but mostly she can't help it- the catching breath in her throat and the welling despair- because she knows she's wrong, but _oh_, if she were right. So she turns around, and this time it is different. Ron is standing under the weeping willow, eyes like sky and a face she knows better than her own. He looks at her, grinning crookedly, and raises his arms.

"Wings, Ginny?" he says, but she's shaking so violently she can't answer him, or even move. Then Ron nearly crushes her, pulling her into a hug and stroking her back in slow circles, until she's finished crying. She would like to tell him how much she misses him, how miserable she has been and how wrong everything is now, but she has a feeling he already knows it well enough. So instead, when he steps back to study her face, she tries a shaky smile.

"God, you're pretty now. Tall, too," he murmurs. Then, grinning again, "But really, Gin, wings?" He raises his arms again, slowly, and this time she sees that he does indeed have wings. They are wide as those of a heron or a crane, the colour of sunset. When he moves his arms, the wings follow. Ginny shakes her head, although the image is oddly familiar.

"I don't know." 

"It's your head, Ginny. Your dream. You tell me." Ron pauses. "You're going to wake up soon." Then he steps back and lets go of her hands, half-smiling and breaking her heart. "You're the queen of hearts, Ginny- trust that, above all else- and you're no-one's canvas."

Then he kisses her forehead, and he's gone. And, stupidly, Ginny remembers where she's seen those wings before. The year after the end of the war, twelve months to the day exactly after Ron's death, Hermione finished a mural on the wall of the Great Hall. It was a vivid chaos of images and colours, a kind of memorial, although Hermione had refused to call it that. And Draco, who had written the accompanying poem, had agreed- this was before, when he and Hermione had formed an uneasy sort of truce, a time that seems to Ginny like three eternities past, now. So they'd called it "not yet lost," and they hadn't let anyone enchant it to move, and Ginny was glad of that, then, because it made it somehow less real. She is still glad of it, now, although her reasons have changed.

In the top left corner of the mural, Hermione painted Ron as a kind of avenging angel of fire. This is truthful, in both the figurative and the literal sense. "The firebringing spell is complex, and it requires a great deal of power and skill in controlling and channeling wild magic," Dumbledore had told them the year he taught sixth and seventh year Defense against the Dark Arts classes combined, "but that is not the reason it is so rarely used. It also requires extraordinary bravery, and absolute loyalty, absolute love. To possess all of these things is an incredible gift, and a doom." Ginny doesn't know, even now, if he knew then how loud and long and far and deep the echoes of those words would be. She doesn't know if Ron was even paying attention that day, and she doesn't know if Dumbledore was looking at him when he spoke, although she thinks it's more than likely. It is equally terrifying to her that he might not have known. 

(wake up)

Absolute love, and absolute loyalty. Ginny still can't see Ron as a hero, because he's the youngest of her brothers, funny and kind and fiercely protective, and he's not perfect, never was, and he's someone she's loved, and more And all of this means that he is not, to her, just the boy who stood at the top of the hill and made of himself a burning brand of hopeless, desperate courage. And although she can't forget the raining fire that set the trees alight for miles in each direction, or the scorched bare earth on the crown of the hill, afterwards, she also can't reduce him to an elegant empty epitaph. It terrifies her that he could have chosen their lives over his own, even if since then they have called him a hero, saying that the storm of power he released was the turning of the tides, beyond all hope. 

(Even when Ginny imagines how things could have ended, she still wishes her brother hadn't climbed that hill, no matter the cost. There are not many people that she can explain this to now, not many who could understand.)

Which is why Ginny is glad that the painting cannot move. It's not a living thing, that image, but a captive snapshot memory of fire and wings. Ginny wonders if Hermione still remembers him like this, all in sunset glory. She thinks the answer is probably no. Hermione has painted Ron too many times in blue and gold to be deceived into thinking red is the right colour. Ginny thinks she could probably explain to Hermione why she wishes her brother was no hero, what she would have given for that one small thing. 

((This is what matters. There are other things, as well, all tied up in knots of love and loyalty; Ginny loved her brother one way, and after she was finished thinking she was _in love _with Harry, she discovered that she loved him that way as well. Ginny has five brothers (had six brothers) and she knows how she loves her brothers. She has never had a sister, though, and for a long time she thought that was the reason she couldn't love Hermione as she loves her brothers. But Ginny isn't blind, least of all when she's looking in the mirror. It didn't take long to know that Hermione was not her sister, in any sense of the word- but there are other kinds of love, more dangerous. And then, almost before Ginny had discovered her mistake, she saw the way Ron looked at the brown-eyed girl who was not his sister, and suddenly there was a question of loyalty and a choice to make. So Ginny chose, and in one way it was impossible, but in other ways it was not even a choice at all. Absolute love and absolute loyalty are things that Ginny knows, as well as her brother knew them. 

This is why she knows that Hermione would understand, if she were to explain that, for her, both possible endings of that night on the hill were equally hellish. Tom Riddle, and Ron. No Riddle, no Ron. Love has little time for reason; love will make you understand that given a choice between a dark world lit by a sudden shining of blue and gold, and a world of light without those colours, you would choose the darkness every time. And Ginny knows that Hermione, too, would have chosen darkness, if it had meant that coloured brightness could go on shining. Ginny made another choice a long long time ago, that Hermione never knew about, that even Ron never had a chance to guess- but that choice was made for love and loyalty, and for loyalty over love. So Hermione, like Ginny (and yet not like, Ginny thinks ruefully) Hermione loved the burning boy before he burned. And this is what matters.))

(wake up)

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not the end yet. chapter five soon (i'm sure you're all holding your breath)


	5. decrescendo

Chapter 5: _decrescendo_

Some say the world will end in fire,

Some say in ice.

From what I've tasted of desire

I hold with those who favor fire.

But if it had to perish twice,

I think I know enough of hate

To say that for destruction ice

Is also great

And would suffice.

- "Fire and Ice", Robert Frost.

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The lights in the restaurant are low, and it's raining outside. 

"But you already know what I'm going to tell you."

"You're leaving."

She nods, and then there is silence and the sound of rain in the gutters exclaiming something, emphatic and hurried and just beyond her reach. 

"I had a dream last night," she says, after a while.

"But you haven'tsince the war?"

"It wasn't like those dreams, exactly. I don't remember much of it. Ron was there."

"Oh, Ginny"

She takes his hands across the table, almost crushing his fingers. "I love you," she says, but renewing those words won't make them shine again. "I loved you," she says, thinking better of it. "Did you love me?" She wonders if what she's doing to him is fair, and hears her mother in her mind- nobody ever said life was fair, dear.

"Yes." And she knows it's true. Then he meets her gaze, grey eyes intent. "For what it's worth."

She nods again, and reaches out to touch his face. "You still have this" There is a scar, a faint white line, just below his eye. 

"When we were living in that apartment."

"When I threw the vase." She pauses. "I never thought it was that deep."

She's stopped crying now (she's cried for two days), although she's pale. She holds his hands because she can feel him trembling.

"It feels like there should be more than this," he says in a low, rough whisper.

She nods and is silent, looking down at their twined hands.

"I'm sorry. For everything." 

"So am I." Oddly formal. So much for bruises, and for broken glass.

He watches her let go of his hands slowly, deliberately.

"So this is it." He looks as though he might cry, but she knows Draco better than that.

"I guess. Take care of yourself, Draco." She turns to go.

"Wait," he says, and she waits, turning back to him. He pulls her into his arms and holds her for a long time, shaking. It rained like this the night Ron died, and Draco was with her then as well. "I'll miss you," he says, so quietly that she might have imagined it.

On impulse, she pulls away a little and looks up at him searchingly. 

"It was worth every second," she says, and kisses him hard, because her mind is screaming that this is the last time. When he rests his head on her shoulder and whispers "Go, Ginny," she can barely hear him over the roaring in her ears, and when he lets her go, her mouth forms the word goodbye but she has no breath left to make it heard. When she gets outside, it is still raining, although, really, it should have stopped by now. 

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not over yetreview?


	6. nothing much

- It's been a whileI'm sorry, I know it's annoying. Life is crazy right now for me, for a variety of reasons. Anyway, and this chapter is extra long, to make up for the wait, and it shouldn't be too long before the next chapter. Thanks for sticking with it this long. I'd love to hear what you think, so drop me a review

Chapter 6: _nothing much_

But of course you were

always nothing. No thing. 

A red-hot rocket, patriotically

bursting in my

veins. Showers of stars-- cascading stars

behind closed eyelids. A

searing brand across my

forehead. Nothing of importance.

A four-letter word stencilled

on the flesh of my inner

thigh.

Stomping through my brain's

mush valleys. Strewing a 

halt of new loyalties.

My life, so I say

nothing much.

-Maya Angelou, "Nothing Much"

================================================

As he kicks the door closed and drops his keys and the groceries on the countertop in an empty apartment, Harry thinks he's probably lucky. He's always been good at looking after people, and that is what he's done, one way or another, with most of his life. For a while, he thought he hated it- saving the world once a year with unfailing regularity and being idolized by half the people he knew and envied by the rest. For a while, he was convinced that Ron, with his protective nature and his passionate, unswerving loyalty, should have been their adopted saviour and superhero instead. Now Ron is dead, for loyalty, along with all the others Harry couldn't look after enough. Harry remembers him (sometimes the memories are too clear, knife-edged in his mind) and looks at those who are left behind- Draco, Hermione, Ginny, and himself- and wonders if maybe people become exactly what they are expected to be. Do they spend their lives doing what they are good at, or do they just become good at what they have to do?

Harry bends his neck to lift the camera over his head, then places it on the table to unload the finished roll of film. Since the war (and Harry's world) ended simultaneously, he's been looking for beautiful things and learning to find them more and more, even in the dark. The camera isn't magic, because he'd rather the photographs didn't move. If a picture can move, it can change, and nothing real stays beautiful forever, as far as Harry can see. And if the pictures don't move, it's easier to see them only in the instant, more perfect than memory. Harry wishes he had even one still photograph of Ron. And he's just as glad as Ginny that Hermione's painting of that night on the hill doesn't move- he'd hate to think of that image being any more real than it is, when already it's far too real.

-----

Harry hears the door click and open, then the jingle of keys being shoved back into a pocket. He looks up momentarily, although he already knows who it is.

"You're back," Draco says, his voice flat and unreadable, which is something he's perfected of late, out of necessity. Draco's control is like an eggshell these days, smooth and fragile, but unbreakable by simple steady pressure. Harry hasn't yet nerved himself to deliver the shattering blow, partially because he's terrified of what he'll find inside. A rotting yolk, maybe, or the shell sucked empty and dry. 

"I'm back. Thanks for feeding the fish"

"Anytime." Draco opens the refrigerator and tosses Harry a bottle of beer, talking absently over his shoulder. "Drink? Here they are- you'll have to go by the liquour store tomorrow, Harry. The beer's all gone, and I finished the whisky the other night."

"And the rum, and the half bottle of tequila, and the champagne I was saving at the back of the cupboard. I know." Harry almost laughs, and Draco grins despite himself, unapologetic. He slides across the kitchen floor- he's wearing black and white striped socks, of all things- and leans against the counter, tapping a quick rhythm with his striped feet on the tiled floor, but his hands are shaking. 

"Well, yeah. It's not my fault your apartment is boring without you in it. The fish aren't much company. I wish you'd get a cat, Harry."

Harry just goes on unpacking the groceries, pretending not to look at Draco. He's gotten quite good at this, watching with half-closed eyes, in quick glances. Draco keeps talking, shifting his weight, tapping the glass bottle, laughing like shards of a broken mirror, and shaking. If he doesn't stop moving, he doesn't have to think about the fact that he's barely breathing. Even like this, lost and scared and trying to hide it, Draco has a kind of cut-crystal perfection that makes it difficult for Harry to look away.

----- 

It's easy to lose things, once you have them. Harry has known this since forever, he feels, although if he is truthful with himself he has to admit that the first time he really understood it was at the end of fifth year, at the Ministry of Magic, when a tattered black curtain swallowed a star. It is not difficult to lose a thing, once you have it- what terrifies Harry is the idea of finding something that you cannot live without- and, more, the idea of becoming the thing without which a person cannot live. Dreams ought not to be built out of glass, Harry thinks, although all too often they are. 

He hasn't taken any photographs of Draco, because of what might unintentionally be admitted in the shadows or the angle, the focus of the lens. He's not Hermione- he won't betray his addiction with every click of the shutter, as she does with every stroke of her brush. He's seen her sketchbook and her paintings, dripping with red, gold, and green. Does Ginny ever open her eyes, he wonders, and crushes the sharp twist of anger before it can cut too deep. It's strange that the need he always felt to protect his little-sister-Ginny never transferred to his best friend, Hermione- who is, after all, just as much his sister. Probably, he thinks, this is because Hermione has always given the impression that she can take care of herself, and of everyone else at the same time. Even on the battlefield, even that night in hell, he was holding on to her with only the same fierce despair that he could feel in her, no more, no less. 

At any rate, he's never felt like he needed to protect Hermione- until now, that is, and this time it's not evil or darkness, nothing so concrete. Spells and incantations wouldn't help him here, nor swords; there is nothing he can do, at all. He won't hate Ginny, if he can help it, because she can't help destroying Hermione, any more than she can help destroying Draco, any more than Draco can help destroying her (or Harry). He won't hate his best friend's little sister for being blinded to beauty by too much horror, because he can more than understand how the war-that-is-now-over is _not_ over, how it won't ever be. He suspects that Hermione has no such reservations about hating Draco.

----- 

Draco stops talking almost suddenly, trailing off into silence in the middle of a sentence, looking over his shoulder out of the window. Harry doesn't speak right away, and when he does, it's quiet. He doesn't cross the kitchen floor, which takes more control than he's ever been able to believe he can depend on exercising. The room is nine large tiles across; Draco, is standing on the ninth.

"What's wrong?" Harry asks softly. He can't bear to scare Draco away, any more than he can dare to draw him any closer. Most of the time, he thinks his sanity depends on keeping this thread stretched taut, keeping Draco just so close and no closer- and he's terrified that if he pulls too hard, the thread will snap, and then he'll have less than the almost-nothing he has now. The rest of the time he almost wants to snap the thread, in the desperate hope of replacing it with something stronger.

It takes a moment for Draco to answer. He slides down the wall he's leaning against to sit on the floor by the window. "I broke up with Ginny. She broke up with me. Something like that."

Harry stops breathing altogether. Draco won't look up at him, which is just as well, because he's gone white as a sheet, and his green eyes are nearly glowing. 

"It's strangeI always thought it would hurt more than this. Or maybe less. I don't know." Then Draco looks up with those avadakedavra silver eyes, and Harry recovers enough to stammer a response.

"Oh.ah, is she okay?"

"I think so. She will be." 

Or at least, as close to "okay" as any of us will ever get, Harry thinks. He has absolutely no idea what he can say to Draco right now. There's a difference between being hurt and being broken- Harry hasn't quite figured out how to recognize that fine line, in himself or in others, but he thinks he knows what it is. Hurt will heal; broken can't. He asks another question, although he's more than certain Draco doesn't know the answer.

"Are you okay?"

-----

It's raining outside, sheeting down like the world's been flipped over and the ocean is crashing down over the city from the sky, thrumming invisibly on roofs and windows until the lightning tears the dark and turns the raindrops silver and it's false blue daylight outside. Draco is sitting cross-legged on the floor, leaning against the wall under the window with his head tilted back and his eyes closed and his hair falling softly back against his shoulders, like feathers. He looks like a child in the hard momentary flashes of brilliance- Draco often seems childlike; his movement and his speech have a quality of starry candour which is deceptive, Harry knows, because Draco never really was a child. Which is why he won't answer Harry's second question directly. 

"It's just like everything else." Draco stops then, and doesn't speak for so long that Harry almost thinks he's said all he's going to say. And then he goes on. "It's _just _like everything else. You'd think one of us would have known better. We really should have fucking known better." He scrubs his hands across his eyes viciously, then looks straight up into Harry's eyes. "You know, the most fucked up part of this whole thing is that I actually loved her, in a weird sort of twisted sick dependent sort of way. I think she might've loved me back."

Harry looks at him but doesn't say what he is thinking, which is how the hell were they together that long if that was the whole explanation. And that Ginny didn't love Draco really, because she's been in love with a certain brown-eyed girl since school, since before she'd even known it. The most fucked up part of this whole thing, Harry thinks but doesn't say, is how can Ginny know she's in love, then forget. Or worse, how can she give up just when it's finally okay to remember. What's worst of all, what he tries not to even think, is how can _you_ have never figured it out in the first place, Draco, and with me knowing it all too well.

Standing nine tiles away from Draco, staring at his hands, Harry knows this whole night is a bad idea. More than a bad idea, in fact; staying in this apartment for even ten more minutes could be the single most reckless thing he's ever done in his life- and he's been doing reckless, stupid things since he was eleven. The reasonable thing to do would be to walk out of this apartment right now, away from what he can't have- what he can't even ask for, because it would be dangerous and foolish and too much- walk out right now and come back in a week, when he can better pretend to be the understanding but detached best friend. It's beyond reckless, staying standing here and watching Draco breathe like he's some sort of glass figurine or a star fallen, standing here wishing he could gather up the pieces or some other equally foolish, desperate metaphor.

-----

Draco is still talking. He's talking about breaking things. 

"You know, I'm very good at what I do, Harry Potter. And don't tell me I need to see a psychiatrist or stop drinking or take a fucking vacation- all I'm saying is that I'm good at my job. A veritable symphony of destruction, that's me." He's looking up and blinking too fast, his eyes a little too shiny. 

Harry is starting to be angry at him for breaking down now, when he never has before. He doesn't know what to say because he's never seen Draco cry before, but he has a feeling this isn't just about Ginny. Not that he'd ever be able to figure out what else it could possibly be, since Draco's about as easy to read as hieroglyphics. Or maybe not hieroglyphics, after all- the thing about Draco, really, Harry thinks, is not that you don't know the words, but that it's too dark in the room to read them. Or they're printed in white ink on white paper. It's frustrating because you know there's something written there that you could understand, if he'd only let you see.

"That's not your job anymore, Draco. It's not what you do, now," Harry says flatly.

Draco goes on as though he hadn't heard at all. "Every time I find anything good, I end up smashing it to pieces. Everything that means anything to me gets shredded and blasted to hell, and then there I am going out and looking for more, and I never fucking learn. And that's when I'm at my least destructive- it's even better when I just see the good thing coming and run like hell in the opposite direction. Why the hell does this keep happening to me?" He gets up from the floor and looks out the window, gripping the ledge so hard his knuckles are white.

"Christ, Draco, you don't _need_ a goddamn shrink, you're doing just fine on your own. You've got it all fucking figured out. Of _course _it's all your own damn fault you and Ginny didn't work out, and that your daddy didn't love you, and that Tom Riddle was a sick sick bastard, and that you had to kill a few people in the war." Harry sort of knows Draco doesn't quite deserve this biting sarcasm, but right now he's too angry to care. Not to mention that he recognizes some of the things that Draco just said for more reasons than he wants to admit.

----- 

Draco whirls around to face Harry, his face gone absolutely white. "You bastard, like you're any better. You've spent most of your life convinced the fate of the world rested solely on your shoulders, feeling so effing guilty for everything that bastard did to us- and you're telling me I'm deluded?"

Harry just stands there for a moment, staring at Draco and not hiding it, too tired now to keep pretending. Besides which he can't remember ever having seen Draco's eyes quite this close to stars. He realizes belatedly that he's not nine tiles across the room any more. At this distance, he could just barely move his hands and he'd be able to touch Draco's and stop them from shaking. He shoves him back against the wall and punches him in the face instead. Draco's head hits the wall with an audible crack.

"Damn it, Draco, do you think you're the only one who's ever destroyed anything?" Draco stays where he is, trapped against the wall with Harry's hands on his shoulders. He reaches up and touches his jaw with one hand disbelievingly. 

"Do you? Answer me." Harry is close enough now to whisper, so he does, and Draco can hear in it something like desperation. "Come on, answer me, just say something..please, say anything."

Draco's mouth is bleeding. He says, "You."

And Harry kisses him. Draco kisses back just as violently, his mouth opening, his head tilting back at an impossible angle. His hands find Harry's shoulders, and he's clinging all of a sudden like he's drowning, or disappearing, and his legs don't seem to hold him up. 

When Harry pulls away, Draco leans back against the wall, breathing hard, eyes half-closed. After a moment he feels Harry moving. Harry's hands, which were heavy on his shoulders, slide down his arms and grip his hands momentarily before letting go. Harry backs away slowly and raises one arm to wipe his mouth. The back of his hand comes away bloody, and he looks as though he is about to cry. He whispers, " I'm sorry. I'm so sorry" and then he whirls and runs out of the room.


End file.
